How to prevent duplicates

m_baraza · August 20, 2020, 11:23am

Hello,

My name is Martin and I’ve been using KoboToolbox for about 1 and a half years now, I’m also new to the forum. I’m a GIS Technician by training at a water and sanitation company I work in.

Last year, I used this tool to perform what we call a Customer Identification Survey, which is basically identifying all our customers in our region based on the available customers database of the company. In the data we collect there is a Unique ID for each customer which acts as a primary key for the database. I wanted to implement my form in a way that if an account with a unique ID has been picked its either rejected automatically. I have attached here a sample of the XLS Form here for those interested.

I’d appreciate the help and advise. Practice Exercise CIS - Experimental 1.xlsx (12.5 KB)

stephanealoo · August 20, 2020, 4:35pm

Hi
Welcome to the community forum. Thank you for the amazing work you have been doing the development space.

Unfortunately, the feature you have been looking for is not supported. The system is not built as a relational database system which allows for instantaneous referral to previously collected data. We can however leave this open to see if there are users who have created a workaround.

Stephane

m_baraza · August 21, 2020, 6:11am

Thanks @stephanealoo for your reply. Hopefully I somehow manage to get a workaround on this too. Guess for now I’ll have to do this manually

m_baraza · September 2, 2020, 5:34am

@stephanealoo so as I was digging deep into this I came across this Pull Data function from here . I want to see if I can use this as a workaround and I’ll get back to you if I succeed or not. Fingers crossed.

stephanealoo · September 2, 2020, 7:10pm

Hi @m_baraza
Yes pull data works but you have to find a way to ensure that all the data is submitted immediately it is collected and the csv you are pulling data from is also updated immediately on the server and on the data collection devices. I have worked with pull data before and it needs an amount of lead time and processing. This makes it virtually impossible to use it dynamically within a form being collected. If you find a workaround, kindly do not hesitate to share.

Stephane